Modifiers themselves are fine. Some languages have a bunch of them, and they have so many characters that adding a new character for every combination is inefficient. I'm more inclined to say that emojis were a mistake, because A) most fonts don't support a significant part of the range and B) most people are only exposed to one or two emoji fonts anyway, which defeats the point of Unicode.

Modifiers themselves are fine. Some languages have a bunch of them, and they have so many characters that adding a new character for every combination is inefficient. I'm more inclined to say that emojis were a mistake, because A) most fonts don't support a significant part of the range and B) most people are only exposed to one or two emoji fonts anyway, which defeats the point of Unicode.

I must say that I only use the integrated image smilies, here, because they are integrated and I have to do something special (as I just have done :oops: ) for the time-honoured ;) and :( to not auto-convert.

On the next tablet over, I have people next to me in a frivolous game's high-score table with (by my uneducated eye) a red-haired oriental woman's head and shoulders icon (or maybe those are alien antenae, not those "chopsticks in the hairbun" thing) as part of the username... Wow. All well and good. Except that the person concerned is clearly flagged as German. There's also often Kanji/etc characters in the list, but not right now (the next most exotic non-emoji character is a series of ###s on one username).

I say, allow alphabetical (or typographical, or pictographical) symbols of all kinds actually in linguistic use (they can abuse a mixture of Chinese and Arabic either side of Latin punctuation to their hearts' contents), but pure pictures go too far in "Name" fields. If they couldmbe filtered against.

Mirkwood wrote:I'm more inclined to say that emojis were a mistake, because A) most fonts don't support a significant part of the range and B) most people are only exposed to one or two emoji fonts anyway, which defeats the point of Unicode.

Remember around ten years ago, when there were all those obnoxious banner ads urging you to install someone's proprietary whatsit so you could communicate with others using talking emoji? I'm not sure if the current situation is an improvement.

Emoji are a necessary part of the standard because the primary mission of Unicode is to losslessly interconvert between all of the pre-existing text encodings and many of those (especially the CJK ones) have emoji, so Unicode must support at least those emoji to accomplish its primary mission.

Adding race or gender modifiers seems a logical response to subsequent user complaints along the lines of "why is there only a dancing woman? I'm a man and I want to show dancing, why is there no dancing man?" (Actually I don't know that race modifiers really are necessary as I'm not sure there's anything racially identifying in any of the original emoji, so rendering them all in the traditional yellow seems racially-neutral enough to me).

Beyond that though, it's quite possible that this extension of emoji in unicode is getting a little out of hand.

One thing that's always bugged me about emoji is that there's no way to customize their colors beyond any built-in modifiers that might exist. I realize you wouldn't want them to always automatically take on the color assigned to the block of text they're in, but there are also a number of cases where being whatever color the OS makes them looks worse.

The other problem I have with them is that they're always constrained to the point size of the surrounding text, whereas traditional emoticons can be as big as the designers think is necessary. Anyone who's seen emojis in, say, YouTube comments on standard 96 dpi screens knows why this sucks.

cephalopod9 wrote:Only on Xkcd can you start a topic involving Hitler and people spend the better part of half a dozen pages arguing about the quality of Operating Systems.

I had, fortunately, managed to avoid all knowledge of the emoji movie until this thread. Even on first reading, I thought it was a joke. It is not.

However, given the plot, it sounds more like it could be derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Men than the emojis themselves. While this is likely not the case, I am choosing to believe it for my mental well being.

He voices an amoral coke-addicted psychopathic CIA director on a Seth McFarlane show. Then, after recording his lines for the day, he goes on to his evening gig at the Theatre, acting in whatever Shakespeare play he's doing that week.

Dude don't give a fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

DanD wrote:I had, fortunately, managed to avoid all knowledge of the emoji movie until this thread. Even on first reading, I thought it was a joke. It is not.

However, given the plot, it sounds more like it could be derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Men than the emojis themselves. While this is likely not the case, I am choosing to believe it for my mental well being.

I have not spent any money on films like "Pixels", "Battleship", any of the "Transformer" franchise, or any of the LEGO movies. You can add this 'emoji movie' abomination to that same list.

RAGBRAIvet wrote:I have not spent any money on films like "Pixels", "Battleship", any of the "Transformer" franchise, or any of the LEGO movies. You can add this 'emoji movie' abomination to that same list.

Of those, I would say that The Lego Movie (yet to see the Batman one) is the absolute exception to the rest in that you really should see it, some time.

(Which is not to say that I understand you as having not seen it, merely that you have not spent any money on it... But on the assumption that you haven't done the former either, rather than spuriously disagree through your actual experience, seeing it is still my general advice, whether the pecuniary fallout is part of that or otherwise.)

I base my assessment on what anyone anywhere actually still uses, and I haven't seen anything below 96 since the pre-LCD days except on those deliberately oversized screens for people who need the Large Print Edition. (And even 96 is exclusively desktops now; laptops hover around 144 or something if they're not straight-up "retina" screens.)

cephalopod9 wrote:Only on Xkcd can you start a topic involving Hitler and people spend the better part of half a dozen pages arguing about the quality of Operating Systems.

DanD wrote:I had, fortunately, managed to avoid all knowledge of the emoji movie until this thread. Even on first reading, I thought it was a joke. It is not.

However, given the plot, it sounds more like it could be derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Men than the emojis themselves. While this is likely not the case, I am choosing to believe it for my mental well being.

I have not spent any money on films like "Pixels", "Battleship", any of the "Transformer" franchise, or any of the LEGO movies. You can add this 'emoji movie' abomination to that same list.

Pixels and all transformer movies are utterly terrible, and I'd fully recommend not watching them to anyone. But battleship was surprisingly entertaining. Not good, but entertaining in a B-movie kind of way.

And the Lego Movie was one of the best movies of that year. It was a really good and funny movie. And I'm not the only one saying that, the movie was universally lauded by critics and audiences alike. It absolutely does not belong on that list.

The more recent lego batman movie was also good, but not nearly as much.

It's one of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I have an independent mind, you are an eccentric, he is round the twist- Bernard Woolley in Yes, Prime Minister

RAGBRAIvet wrote: You can add this 'emoji movie' abomination to that same list.

And remove the LEGO movie. It's not the greatest thing I've ever seen, but it's quite entertaining and I really like the animation. Mostly because it resembles the stop-motion "brickfilms" I've been watching on Youtube for a long time now, and I think that's intentional.

Modifiers themselves are fine. Some languages have a bunch of them, and they have so many characters that adding a new character for every combination is inefficient. I'm more inclined to say that emojis were a mistake, because A) most fonts don't support a significant part of the range and B) most people are only exposed to one or two emoji fonts anyway, which defeats the point of Unicode.

My bad, I meant modifiers within emoji specifically. In the regular character blocks I'd argue the opposite, the combined characters, are a mistake. But alas, unicode is the describing organisation, not the prescribing one.

Diadem wrote:The more recent lego batman movie was also good, but not nearly as much.

Heh, I was going to say it comes nowhere close to the lego movie, but I accidentally skipped through the Lego Batman: The Movie – DC Super Heroes Unite, not The lego batman movie. Slightly huge difference.